Sparx Systems Forum

Enterprise Architect => Suggestions and Requests => Topic started by: fwoolz on August 04, 2005, 10:23:05 am

Title: Exponential Recursion in Hierarchy View
Post by: fwoolz on August 04, 2005, 10:23:05 am

I have a bunch of requirement elements (several hundred) in a model. The requirements are nested such that there are requirements that own other requirements that own other requirements...and so on, similar to the structure of a written specification. Given that the hierarchy view shows both "owns" and "owned by" links (recursion!), a fully expanded tree at greater depths results in an exponential explosion in the size of the tree, enough to cause EA to use about 100% of the CPU and > 200 Meg of memory (and climbing) before I shut it down (this happened at a depth of 10 for the subject model). I should add that this wasn't an academic exercise; I had set the depth to 10 without thinking, then tried to expand the tree.

I don't know off-hand how difficult it would be to implement or what the shortcomings might be, but might it not be a good idea to omit the "owned by" branch for all but the topmost node in the tree?

BTW--I'm using EA 5.0, build 768.

Cheers,

Title: Re: Exponential Recursion in Hierarchy View
Post by: Paolo F Cantoni on August 04, 2005, 04:17:10 pm

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I don't know off-hand how difficult it would be to implement or what the shortcomings might be, but might it not be a good idea to omit the "owned by" branch for all but the topmost node in the tree?

BTW--I'm using EA 5.0, build 768.

Cheers,

Yes, Fred, I've also noticed this.  Both strategies should be options (since multiple inheritance is growing in usage).
If we're talking suggestions, it would be good to be able to pick a node in the hierarchy and then ask EA to re-plot the hierarchy for that node (with -possibly- new options).  Best of all would be the ability to do this in "a new window" so that you could investigate specific nodes while retaining the original hierarchy.

Cheerz,
Paolo